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Theater Talkback: Familiar Faces in Two Dimensions

Jessica Chastain in the film "Zero Dark Thirty," left, and on Broadway in "The Heiress."Credit Left, Jonathan Olley/Columbia Pictures; Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Between Al Pacino and Frankenstein’s monster, my life was a theater-free zone. In the last month of last year, I saw Mr. Pacino chomping up the Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”; and in the first month of this year, I watched several versions of Mary Shelley’s big man-made galoot chomping up the Kitchen, the performance space in Chelsea, in Radiohole’s “Inflatable Frankenstein.”

In between the two spectacles of strenuous scenery chewing, I was on vacation. And I had vowed that during those three weeks, I would not see or think about a single play.

For someone who spends most of his time watching, writing about and pondering the theater, this (like so many pledges made at the end of a year) is not an easy vow to keep. It’s true that I never once set foot into a so-called legitimate theater during my holiday, though I went to a couple of parties that seemed to be under the impression they were just that. But I can’t honestly say that the theater was ever far from my thoughts.

To start with, when I’m not working, I tend to have the critic’s classic nightmares. These are much like the actor’s nightmares (as in Christopher Durang’s peerless one-act play on that subject) or the student’s nightmares. In the critic’s version, you discover that you have arrived late for a play already in progress that is a) being performed in an unknown language; and b) features a central character that has yet to be cast and that you are expected to portray – right now.

The dreams I could shake off in the morning, at least after coffee. But then I’d settle into a book and of course, being me, I’d have chosen recently published diaries in which the theater was sure to rear its greasepaint-smeared head sooner or later: the journals of the actor Richard Burton (who liked to talk about why he didn’t like being in plays) and of Christopher Isherwood (who devotes long entries to the anxieties of adapting his novel “A Meeting by the River” to the stage).

And, oh yes, I went to the movies a couple of times, and, while I didn’t have a television where I was, I downloaded a season of “Downton Abbey” in which I might lose myself on snowbound days. But of course memories of the theater kept invading any screen I looked at. How could they not, when so many of the same actors work in both forms?

I was reunited with three stars of the Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” which I’d reviewed earlier in the fall: Jessica Chastain (on screen in “Zero Dark Thirty”); David Straithairn (playing Seward in the Stephen Spielberg film “Lincoln”); and Dan Stevens (appearing as the romantically indecisive heir to Downton Abbey). This of course set me to musing on the differences between stage and screen acting and why, for instance, Ms. Chastain seemed so ineffably right for “Zero” and so out of place in “The Heiress.”

Mostly, though, what I experienced when I saw familiar faces that I knew in three dimensions translated into two was a rush of warm, slightly proprietary recognition. It’s sort of like the feeling you get when you come across a picture of an old classmate or lover in a magazine or newspaper, and you start to think about the good times you once shared.

One of the chief thrills for me of “Zero Dark Thirty” – a pretty thrilling film to begin with – was slowly realizing that the actress who gives the movie its most emotionally readable character was Jennifer Ehle, playing a C.I.A. operative who is less poker-faced than her colleagues. There’s a crucial moment when Ms. Ehle’s face splits into a smile that is heartbreakingly open – full of hope and glee and anticipation and apprehension. And I remembered first falling for that same smile, employed for different purposes and to different effect, when I saw Ms. Ehle in her Tony-winning performance in Tom Stoppard’s “Real Thing” in 2000.

As regards “Downton Abbey,” I immediately knew that there was more to the young, icy Lady Mary Crawley than her haughtiness. When a friend of mine ventured in a phone conversation that Mary was “so wooden,” I snapped her head off.

That’s because I saw Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary, four years ago in London as Eliza Doolittle, in Shaw’s “Pygmalion” at the Old Vic. Ms. Dockery was the best Eliza I had ever seen on stage, investing that Cockney flower girl with a strength of will that made her eventual triumph over ‘enry ‘iggins inevitable. She was a natural aristocrat, waiting to blossom. That invincibility is also evident in her proud Mary, but there is also self-doubt and uncertainty that glimmer suddenly and unexpectedly. Ms. Dockery has adroitly flipped the emotional equation of her Eliza.

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Brendan Coyle in "The Weir" on Broadway in 1999.Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

As for the stoic, cryptic manservant Mr. Bates, I knew I’d seen him before, in person, being stoic and cryptic in a different way. And so I had. Mr. Bates is played by Brendan Coyle, who provided one of the best interpretations of just listening that I have witnessed. That was in Conor McPherson’s “Weir” (1997), in which Mr. Coyle played the largely silent bartender in a pub full of long-winded drinkers. Though he said less than anyone, it was Mr. Coyle who walked away with the Olivier Award that season.

The movie “Lincoln” turned out to be a veritable feast for those of us who like to spot New York stage actors on screen, as rich in that respect as a whole season of “Law & Order.” Look! There’s Stephen Spinella! And Julie White and Michael Stuhlbarg and Byron Jennings and S. Epatha Merkerson (who, for the record, has been as commanding a New York stage actress as she was a police lieutenant on “Law and Order”).

But my favorite moment, in terms of actor-spotting serendipity, came early in the film when Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln gives an audience to two common folk from Jefferson City, Mo. They’re a husband and wife with a grievance about a toll booth, and they exude a finely textured eccentricity that makes them feel both utterly individual and like the vox populi incarnate. Boy, they’re terrific, I thought, before belatedly identifying them as Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp, two of the most daring and versatile stage performers in New York (who also happen to be married to each other).

I’ll be seeing Ms. Marvel soon in the Broadway revival of “Picnic.” And, honestly, though I had sworn to banish theater from my mind, seeing Ms. Marvel, however fleetingly in “Lincoln” in mid-December, I was glad to be reminded I had something to look forward to when I went back to work in January.

I’ll refrain from asking you how you spent your Christmas vacation. But would any of you like to share a gratifying instance of recognizing a favorite stage actor on screen?